Italy
1973
Director: Eriprando Visconti
Cast: Duilio Del Prete, Carla Gravina, Tony Musante, Marcella Michelangeli.
Running time: 98′ min.
Here’s another film to deal with the fallout of the controversial murder of Sicilian bandit Salvatore Giuliano, a kind of unofficial sequel to Francesco Rosi’s acclaimed Salvatore Giuliano, made a decade earlier. It starts as that film ended, with the murder of Salvatore Pisciotta – Giuliano’s right hand man, confidant and quite possibly killer – poisoned by a doctored cup of coffee in a Palermo jail. Idealogical young magistrate Tony Musante is called in to investigate, and despite the advice of both family and friends he refuses to drop the case, eventually settling on a powerful Mafia don (Nino Terzo) as his main suspect.
But the Mafia grows increasingly anxious about his investigations, and resolve that they should do all they can to ensure that the killer remains unpunished. It’s a decent enough film, although not as powerful as Damiano Damiani’s similarly themed L’istruttoria รจ chiusa: dimentichi. There’s an excessive amount of dialogue and some rather stilted sequences around Musante and his family / girlfriend. But the cinematography and editing are good and Eriprando Visconti – a weird filmmaker who started out as an art-house darling before making increasingly trashy films throughout the seventies – directs it all capably enough. Not bad.
